"No, indeed, Annie!" I exclaimed, seizing her hand as she sat beside me,--"this is the first hour's actual rest I have had for months; it is like the returning sleep of health after delirium. You shall not go. When have I ever had you to myself before? The time is beautiful; we are happy; do not let us go up to Hillside to-day--or any more." I spoke not so much wildly as naturally and weariedly; but Annie's cheek flushed scarlet, as she started, with a touch of Miss Darry's energy, from the stump beside me. "Yes, Sandy, we will go to Hillside at once; you shall tell Miss Darry, that, in talking over by-gone days with your little sister, you forgot yourself and overstayed your time; and I, too, must make my excuses." She walked quickly away, and before I had risen, in a half-stupefied way, she was at the stile. It was rather difficult to rejoin her. I had the novel and not altogether pleasing sensation of having been refused before I had asked; and my child-friend, taught of Nature's simple dignity and sense of right, was more at ease for the remainder of the walk than I. CHAPTER XIV. I meant to have frankly confessed my talk with Annie to Miss Darry. No orthodox saint could have been more penitentially conscious of having fallen from grace. But she gave me no time. She was either so animated, so thoroughly agreeable and entertaining, that I felt only pride at the part I held in her, or else she gave premonitory symptoms of a return to the drill, which always suggested to me the absolute need of physical exercise, and ended in a walk or horseback ride,--in her company, of course. At last I really was so far restored, that my plea of being so much stronger, more at rest, near her, (which was true, for her oral teaching was not unmingled with subtile fascination,) failed to call forth the genial, loving smile. She began to pine for more honors, greater development, more earnest life. Strange! I, the former blacksmith, was a very flower, lulled in the _dolce far niente_ of summer air and sunshine, beside her more vigorous intellectual nature. Sensation and emotion were scarcely expressed by me before they were taken up into the arctic regions of her brain, and looked coldly on their former selves. I resolved one day, by a grand effort, to leave the next. As I had not seen Annie since the walk with her to Hillside, and had declined Mrs. Lang's offer to invite her to the house that I might see more of her, on the ground of fatigue and occupation in the evening with Miss Darry, it became incumbent upon me to go to the cottage for a farewell. It looked very quiet, as I approached. The blinds were closed, as in summer, and there was no one in the kitchen. Hearing footsteps in the sitting-room, however, I entered, and met Miss Dinsmore with her finger on her lips and an agitated expression on her face.